Originally posted by d000hg
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A basic tenet of Human rights laws is freedom from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and freedom of religious expression
If the Government stress that no church will be compelled by law to conduct same sex marriages, I doubt if this will be enough to satisfy a Human Rights directive if two homosexuals take their case to Europe. I can see this thrown out very quickly.
Edit:
June 2012:
[The] Church of England sounded the alarm that “it must be very doubtful whether limiting same-sex couples to non-religious forms and ceremonies could withstand a challenge under the European Convention on Human Rights”
EU Courts 2010 strongly suggested that once states do allow equal marriage, gay couples will be protected in exactly the same way as heterosexual couples in terms of marriage rights. Which in turn means that the European Court of Human Rights might be more willing to intervene once a state has legalised gay marriages and therefore brought homosexuals and heterosexuals under the same umbrella of equalities protections.
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